Antisemitism Is Focus of ‘Playing Shylock’ as Well as Several New Off-Broadway Productions Tackling the Subject

In “Playing Shylock,” now running at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center at Brooklyn, we meet an actor who is doing just that in a staging of “The Merchant of Venice” when he learns, before the second act of a performance, that the production has been discontinued — or “canceled,” as he puts it, tellingly. The reason, as stated in a press release that was supposed to have been embargoed until the following day, is that it has been deemed “inappropriate at this time of rising antisemitism.”The trouper, who is played by and named after Saul Rubinek — the Canadian-born stage and screen veteran for whom this one-man, one-act piece was crafted — takes a beat after reading this explanation, and then wonders aloud, “Has there ever been a time when antisemitism was not rising?”It’s a timely question. Even before the historic catastrophe of October 7, 2023, statistics were showing a disturbing growth in this strain of bigotry. Yet as both artists and advocates, Jews have often been at least as interested in addressing the oppression of other groups as in exploring this ancient and enduring hatred. When antisemitism is examined in theater in particular, it is frequently in the context of the most obvious and egregious example: the Holocaust. Recent Broadway seasons have seen a sprinkling of new plays set during and around that period; Joshua Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic” also brought us into the 21st century, and reminded us that antisemitism is not exclusively the realm of Nazis or, today, white nationalists.“Playing Shylock,” one of several new off-Broadway productions tackling this subject, goes further, calling out Jews for our complicity. Adapted by Mark Leiren-Young, a Canadian playwright, from his 1996 play “Shylock” at Mr. Rubinek’s suggestion, “Playing” finds the actor, who is in fact the son of Holocaust survivors, addressing the audience as if we had arrived to see him in an actual production of “Merchant.”Storming onstage, Saul — essentially a mouthpiece for Mr. Rubinek — immediately goes rogue, breaking out of Shylock’s character to share news of the fictional show’s fate and launching into what at first threatens to be an extended rant about cancel culture, replete with denunciations of social media.In defending one of Shakespeare’s most controversial plays, and Shylock in particular, Saul also gets personal. There are references to his family’s tortured history, including his father’s involvement in Yiddish theater, and his own career; he describes a conversation with an NPR host who was only interested in his work on “Frasier” — one of several high-profile TV series and films in which Mr. Rubinek has been featured — and with Al Pacino, with whom he co-starred in another, the more recent “Hunters.”If “Playing” can seem self-indulgent at times under the direction of Martin Kinch, a longtime colleague and friend of the actor, Messrs. Leiren-Young and Rubinek make some salient observations. Saul proposes that for all of Shylock’s flaws, he was “the first three-dimensional Jewish character in the history of English literature” — an improvement not only on Barabas, the despicable title character in Christopher Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta,” but on even more vile and cartoonish representatives that had preceded that infamous work.There are also accounts of the phenomenon Saul amusingly labels “circumcised names” — celebrities who have concealed their Jewish heritage, from Tony Curtis and Bob Dylan, respectively born Bernard Schwartz and Robert Zimmerman, to Winona Ryder, née Horowitz — and other manifestations of Jewish self-loathing. Saul describes an event at a Jewish Community Center where the host, herself the daughter of survivors, accuses him of looking and sounding “too Jewish” to play Shylock, worrying that he’ll be “reinforcing the stereotype of the evil Jewish moneylender.”If “Playing Shylock” offers one message, it’s the need for such fear to be countered by pride, and respect for the suffering and sacrifices of others. “My parents didn’t survive the Holocaust,” Saul tells us at one point, “so I could erase myself.”Mr. Leiren-Young’s play shared its opening night at New York with a new presentation of “Hannah Senesh,” a work based on the diaries and poems of Senesh, a Hungarian-born woman who in the early 1940s parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe as part of an organized effort to help her fellow Jews. For the mission Senesh left the safety of Mandatory Palestine, where she had taken refuge, and wound up being executed at Budapest at the age of 23, by the fascist Arrow Cross party.The new staging of “Senesh,” by National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene — performed in English, at Manhattan’s Theater Row — stars Jennifer Apple in the title role, originally played by Lori Wilner, who also developed the piece with playwright and director David Schechter. It is, like “Playing Shylock,” essentially a one-person play, though Simon Feil appears briefly as a border guard and provides the voice of Hannah’s brother, George, whom we never see.Jennifer Apple in ‘Hannah Senesh.’ Tricia BaronMs. Apple plays both Hannah, whom we meet at the age of 13, and, in scenes that function as a prologue and epilogue, her mother, Catherine. Both portraits, as guided by Mr. Schechter, can take on a melodramatic quality that is, to be fair, not out of sync with Yiddish theatrical tradition, and the actress can be as charming summoning young Hannah as she crushes on a boy as she is moving in showing us Catherine’s grief.The one-act play also features music by Steven Lutvak and additional songs by Mr. Schechter and the late Elizabeth Swados — creator of “Runaways,” the fondly remembered ’70s musical — that provide a showcase for Ms. Apple’s supple, nuanced singing. “Soon,” Mr. Schechter’s contribution, finds Hannah, an avowed Zionist, beginning her life in Palestine.“Hannah Senesh” retains its relevance in no small part by placing its heroine’s Zionism in historical context: It’s no accident that the movement gained so much momentum during Hitler’s rise, or that Israel was officially established just a few years after his fall. Whatever your take on conflicts in the Middle East, or right here at home, it’s worth remembering — if recent events and ongoing tensions haven’t already reinforced this — that wasn’t terribly long ago.

Antisemitism Is Focus of ‘Playing Shylock’ as Well as Several New Off-Broadway Productions Tackling the Subject

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